Quiz Time!!

Focus?

When you have a topic or question of interest, what can you do with it?

  • Exploring
  • Describing
  • Explaining

Exploration

  • What to explore?
    • Satisfying curiosity.
    • Testing the feasibility of more works.
    • Developing methods.
  • Weak points?

Describing

US Census

Oh, Causality!

Explanation in general

  • Case-focused: Ideographic explanation
    • Complete, in-depth understanding of a single case
  • Pattern-focused: Nomothetic explanation
    • Defence for causality

Critera for nomothetic explanation

  • The variables must be correlated.
  • The cause takes place before the effect.
  • The variables are nonspurious.

Correlation

"An empirical relationship between two variables such that (1) changes in one are as- sociated with changes in the other, or (2) particular attributes of one variable are associated with particular attributes of the other." (Babbie 94)

So, if you have to dump someone…

Time-order

Spurious relationship

"A coincidental statistical correlation between two variables, shown to be caused by some third variable." (Babbie 94)

Three false criteria

  • Complete causation
  • No exception
  • Majority rule

Complete causation

Exception (probability)

Majority rule

Build your explanation with the right bricks

Unit of Analysis

If you used the wrong bricks,…

Reductionism

(Reductionist fallacy, individualist fallacy, exception fallacy)

An example:

  • Hank: I ran my car off the side of the road because that damn squirrel ran in front of my car.
  • Officer: You don't think it had anything to do with the fact that you were trying to text your girlfriend, and driving drunk?

Beyond Causality

Ragin's purpose of soical research:

  1. identifying patterns and relaitonships.
  2. testing and refining theories.
  3. making predictions
  4. interpreting culturally and or historically significant phenomena
  5. exploring diversity
  6. giving voice
  7. advancing new theories.

Predicting

  • What's prediting?
  • Why is it important?
  • What's the relation of this purpose with explanation?

Interpreting

Theda Skocpol (1979): States and Social Revolutions

  • Surveying the revolutions in Russia, France, and China
  • Two arguments:
    • Starting: crisis of state (international factor) + patterns of class domiance
    • Outcome: crisis + socioeconomic/international constrains

  • Is Skocpol (1979) ideographic?
  • How is this different from historian study?
  • How is this different from explanation?

Giving voice

  • Studies of gender rights
  • Studies of environmentalism
  • Studies of social media
  • Studies of terrorism

No research exists in vacuum!

  • Concerning the substantive questions
  • Relying on empirical evidence:
    • cross-sectional
    • time-series